Fred's Greatest Fear
by Bryony Honeysuckle
Summary: In which we all find out Fred's true fear. ONE SHOT


**Managed to upload this just in the nick of time! I decided to write a Halloween thing at 3pm then realised I had no time to think of a plot let alone conjure up coherent sentences... I'm not one for horror but I hope you enjoy this not-spooky-but-still-spooky-related-story, and I'm going to go to sleep!**

**Feel free to check out my other stories, and hopefully soon I'll creep out of my little shell of hiatus and abandonment!**

**~BH**

Fred's Greatest Fear

"So what scares Fred Weasley most then?" Hermione asked her best friend as they comfortably sprawled themselves across the armchairs in the common room. Fred, George, Ron and Harry were at Quidditch practice, giving Hermione the perfect opportunity to tell Ginny an idea that had been bubbling in her head for days.

"He's pretty fearless..." Ginny mused in response, sitting up straighter. "I mean, he won't admit it but he's really scared of you-know-who... But that's pretty rational, right?"

Hermione nodded. Despite her desire to prank the prankster himself, scaring him with You-know-who would not only scare him, but also send the entire school into chaos.

"Why do you want to know anyway? Don't you know everything about him by now?" Ginny smirked. Fred and Hermione were often the talk of the school these days, which bemused Harry, angered Ron and excited Ginny.

"I've never seen him scared..." pondered Hermione, thinking about all the times she'd been scared and how Fred comforted her, but she'd never been able to return the favour. It was as if Fred was a computer, and the program of fear had never been installed. She remembered horror games she had played as a child, and the amount of books she would have to read after to ensure she didn't have nightmares. Not that she'd ever minded reading.

"Me neither." Replied Ginny, snapping out of her train of nostalgia. "He's always been the one to do the scaring."

Hermione giggled. Ginny saw the glint in Hermione's eye that seemed to signal she was up to something. Ginny was never one to miss something interesting, and Hermione was never one to hide her feelings.

"What's your plan?" Ginny got straight to the point, not hanging around.

"I feel like the tables need to be turned." Responded Hermione, finally abandoning her book on the table. "We need to find out Fred Weasley's greatest fear."

"Today is the day!" Were the words Fred was brutally woken up to, by none other than his twin brother. Halloween was their second favourite holiday, after April Fool's day and before Bonfire Night.

"Indeed it is." Fred eventually replied, his voice groggy with sleep as he shoved George off his bed.

"We never decided what prank we were going to pull for Halloween!" George reminded him, pulling Fred out of bed too. "Are you still planning to scare Hermione?"

"I don't know," Fred groaned, rubbing his head where he had abruptly hit the carpeted floor of the dormitory. "She seems really stressed out lately, she's always thinking about other things."

"It might cheer her up though?" George suggested, hauling himself up and running a hand through his hair in the mirror.

"I don't think so." Fred replied. "She appreciates our pranks but she would never look me in the eye again if I turned the tables on her." He sighed. "I don't want to risk it." He said quietly.

Fred and Hermione's relationship was something Fred treasured alongside his twin brother. She had become a part of him, like George had always been.

"Maybe our Halloween display will cheer her up, if we FINISH PLANNING." George emphasised the last few words as Fred joined him in the mirror.

"Alright, alright!" Laughed Fred. "We've got charms first, so Lee will be there too."

"Merlin knows we're going to need an extra brain with yours up in the clouds." George replied as they quickly got dressed and headed to class.

Hermione was ready. She glanced across the corridor to Ginny who gave her the thumbs up. Hermione had the Marauder's Map in her hand, thinking to herself that she never saw the day that she would be here, using it without Harry and Ron by her side. She had a list of the most common fears in her hand from a book she had borrowed from the library and her plan was to work her way through them. The two girls were positioned along the route to Fred and George's charms class. They knew they were always late to their lessons, to Hermione's disgust, but this time it worked in her favour. The corridor was blissfully empty. First on her list, in Hermione's neat writing, was "Fear of the dark". She knew Fred and George took a shortcut so she planned to suddenly extinguish the lights and listen for their reactions. Ginny nodded at Hermione as her sharp ears heard the familiar loud footsteps of her twin siblings. Hermione grinned, and pointed her wand under the portrait, wordlessly plunging Fred and George into darkness.

She waited with bated breath, as she heard their footsteps stop abruptly.

"And now: Darkness." Fred bellowed dramatically to George.

"And now: Lumos!" George replied, as the footsteps echoed again across the corridor. Hermione heard Ginny's muffled giggles. Frustrated at her failure, she tried to suppress a glare aimed at Ginny and scarpered behind a statue. She watched Fred and George walk past non plussed.

"You can't be good at everything." Ginny told her, joining her dismayed friend. "That was a total flop."

"Pranking can't be that difficult!" Exclaimed Hermione, waiting until her victims were out of earshot. "They make it look so... Simple."

"That's because they've been doing it since the day they were born." Answered Ginny, steering her friend back towards the common room. "Do you really want to bother with the rest?"

"Yes!" Hermione responded almost in horror. "I'm not one to give up!"

Not to Ginny's surprise, Hermione still hadn't succeeded in finding Fred's greatest fear. They were now sitting at the Halloween feast, and Ginny was trying to distract Fred from her dejected friend.

"Is Hermione okay?" Fred asked, looking around Ginny and watching Hermione stir her Pumpkin soup slowly.

"She's fine, don't worry." Replied Ginny quickly, blocking Fred's view by grabbing the nearest bowl of chips and pouring them haphazardly onto her plate, ignoring the worried looks of her fellow Gryffindors.

"Are you sure?" Fred pressed on, pinching a few of her chips and leaning forward slightly in his chair.

"Yes!" Ginny defended Hermione, groaning internally and wondering if she would ever accept that she can't always succeed. Ginny had always admired Hermione for her drive and strong will, but sometimes she overshot it, and then couldn't suffer with the consequences.

Fred wasn't going to give up easily either, and he was suddenly prepared to take the consequences of his actions.

"Are you okay Hermione?" Fred snuck up behind her after the feast had eventually ended. Hermione jumped, her arm brushing against his as she unsteadily tried to control her sudden increase in pulse.

"Of course I am. It's just one of those days, I guess." Hermione smiled quickly, shifting to the side so Fred could walk with her.

"Well let's at least get to the common room quicker so you can relax, I'm sure you've got some novel to finish." Fred beamed much more genuinely than Hermione, which made her feel a little guilty and did nothing to slow down her beating heart.

"Well there's that set of stairs behind the portrait further down the corridor..." Hermione suggested, to Fred's amusement.

"So Harry has been sharing the knowledge of our idols..." Fred chuckled to himself, which Hermione didn't quite hear, but decided to ignore it. She wanted to find our Fred's fear before the night was over, it was like when she got one line of a song stuck in her head but couldn't remember the singer, or the song title. It was niggling in the back of her mind like a Niffler scrabbling for gold.

Hermione ran a finger along the left side of the portrait frame and it slid to one side. Fred gracefully clambered in, and offered a hand to Hermione. She took it, and somehow they both forgot to let go as they shuffled down the corridor together. The lamps along the walls dimly lit a pathway that revealed a trapdoor and a small set of stairs. Hermione felt relaxed by the glow, as she was used to the small beam of her reading light at home when she would often read into the early hours of the following morning.

Then they were sent into a chasm of darkness.

"Huh, this happened to me this morning." Fred sighed, fumbling his pocket for his wand. He was put off by the creaking of the trapdoor, only a few metres away from them. Slowly it opened, Hermione clung closer to Fred, hope the tables hadn't suddenly been turned on both of them.

A shadow flung itself against the wall as an undistinguishable object lowered itself from the ceiling, and onto the top step.

The next thing Hermione knew, Fred had squealed like a 12 year old girl discovering her parents having sex and had sprinted towards the other end of the corridor. Glancing back at Fred, half excited, half terrified, she edged forward closer to the thing. Did Fred have a fear of dark objects, rather than the dark itself? She approached the bottom step and noticed it was simply a bare foot. Not moving, not scary at all, just a single, rather large foot.

"Fred?" She called quietly, rushing back towards a violently shaking Fred. "Fred." She repeated, laying a hand on his trembling shoulder. "It's just a foot."

"I can't be dealing with this." Muttered Fred, mostly to himself. "Not today, not ever."

"Fred!" Hermione took his face in her hands and made him look at her. "It's just a foot."

Fred relaxed a little at Hermione's touch, but his brain was clouded with fear.

"The foot..." He said shakily, his face still cupped by Hermione.

"It's not going to hurt you." Said Hermione, a little bemused by the situation. Of all the things Fred was scared of, it was feet?

"There was this one time..." Fred confided, his face still pale. "I just can't bear the sight of them. I can't disassociate feet with the memory..." His voice tailed off, his body once again succumbing to the irrational fear that washed over him.

Hermione rushed back over to the foot, which hadn't moved a muscle. A spell was obscuring her view up the trapdoor to see who's leg it belonged to, or if it was even a real foot at all.

Then Hermione had an idea. One of her better ideas.

"Maybe you need a new memory to associate with the feet." Hermione mused, surprised that she would ever construct such a sentence.

Next thing Fred knew, he was being kissed by the girl he had loved for so long, and he never had a fear of feet again, and he never knew whose foot caused this fantasy to come true.

Hermione had not only become a part of his memory, but the part of his soul he longed to truly fill with her love.


End file.
